At 2:44 PM 12/28/99, Maria & Doug Storm wrote:
Gabriel, you answered my question, actually. But I'm a little confused now; are you solely using Amazon for it's data and ordering service? Why does a customer come to your site then, rather than just using Amazon?
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 15:59:19
Gabriel, Thanks for taking so much time and effort to answer me. And to answer your question, I found you, as you say others due, in doing a search for some volumes of Emerson's Journals on Yahoo! My interest also stems from the fact that I am a sales manager for R. R. Bowker's online reference productsBIP, LMP, Ulrich's, etc. I'm always interested to find out where people are getting their data. The chain of connections is interesting.

You know that Amazon gets their bib. data from Baker & Taylor. I'll check the site out some more and maybe get back to you again. Thanks so much for the time. Doug

Well Doug, that's a question I have asked myself repeatedly the past two and a half years since I signed up as an Amazon associate. But I had an elder female cousin recently give me an answer that complemented the one I had usually accepted as close to the truth. Fact is, I think people, mostly students, find my site through a random author search on one of the larger search engines such as Alta Vista or Yahoo, and because I have been in existence since April, 1997, have steadily been building up visitor hits one way or the other, and include a rather obscure (save to students) reading list, they tend to find my site near the top of the search returns, click, and either decide to buy a book on my virtual shelves, or else find something else at Amazon via a click through which still garners me a referral commission.

My cousin however suggested that she would be more apt to buy from a personalized reading list she respected than she would directly from a huge mega distributor.

So the combination of these factors is what drives a few dollars into my pockets, not much mind you, but after this past holiday rush, certainly enough to make the store efforts in the past, seem worthwhile. I think your own experience should help summarize this phenomenon. How did YOU find the Bookskellar?

My bibliography is merely one man's collection of personal reading projects and contrarian viewpoints centered around nothing more than the desire to run a little bookshop of my own. Of course I haven't put in as much time as I would like in expanding my shelves. It does take quite a bit of HTML clean-up to prepare authors for the Bookskellar site.

Okay Cassie. Thanks for the tips and the patronage. Checked out your site, and was impressed by the growth I've seen over the past year or so. I indeed will investigate your leads and make the organizational changes you suggest. As for more detailed info on individual titles, any stuff you zip my way will be appreciated. As I mentioned earlier all the information I have is what is presented to me by the distributor, and you are obviously far more savvy to the JC library than I am, so I will embrace any details you feed me. Thanks again for the nod. Indeed I want to thank you for your promotional link to the Bookskellar.

I have sold several JC books over the past few months, and no doubt have you to thank for it. Give me a week or so to make the changes you've suggested. I've noticed that Amazon has already killed some of their own JC links so I will make a bona fide effort to clean up the carnage on the JC page. Like I say, gimme a few days. Things are rather hectic around here this week. Because I am still unfamiliar with frames, I can only presume that the Bookskellar JC URL will remain the same, although it doesn't show up in the active location cell. Regardless, I will send you a note informing you that the changes have been implemented. Thanks again. And I promise soon, I'll get around to spewing my Jim Carroll anecdotes, for better or for worse. We've never actually been formally introduced, but we crossed each other arrogant paths several times in the Eighties in DC...

GT
Thanks for responding so quickly! After I sent my message to you late last night, it occurred to me that it sounded really pushy, so I'm relieved! I greatly appreciate your interest in this. Also, I'm intrigued that JC is so popular on your site. Hmmm. I'm curious to know more about the numbers you are getting, because I am becoming more and more amazed to discover how many JC fans there are just on the internet. At least three people e-mail me every day asking to be added to my mailing list (sometimes as many as ten in one day), and that's only a small percentage of the people visiting my website. I *think* it gets about 50 hits per day on the website--which amazes me partly because the links on all of the search engines still point to the old "ernie" location, but also because I can't believe there are so many JC fans out there. Of course it could just be the same five people visiting ten times a day...I know that JC fans tend to be sort of obsessive that way (hee hee).

Well, that's enough rambling from me. I hope I can send some business your way, and I
would love to hear your JC stories!

I am interested in Jim Carroll titles etc. Can I contact you by phone? If so what is the number?Jan Williams

Jan, I am not adverse to giving our my phone number, but it is most likely unnecessary that we actually talk. I presume you must be experiencing trouble trying to order from the Bookskellar site. This problem is due to the fact that our supplier (AMAZON.COM) has gone offline temporarily, and has been so for about a week. These technical difficulties may yet continue for another week according to a memo I received yesterday from the AMAZON folks.

I regret any inconvenience to you in these matters and am quite dismayed that Bookskellar customers are being turned away under circumstances I cannot control. If you can wait out this technical difficulty AMAZON is currently experiencing, returning to:

http://www.imote.com

Internet Girls

...and the Bookskellar, you should be able to place your orders with no problem shortly. Outside of what you can read from our online catalogue, there is really no further information I can provide you about any specific Jim Carroll listings.

However, once AMAZON is back online, clicking on a particular Jim Carroll listing will take you to the JC listing on the AMAZON site where often there IS some further information on that particular title.

I hope this clarifies things for you, and thanks for your interest in our books.

Gabriel Thy

P.S. Wed Jun 18 07:46:30 1997 Amazon.com returns to its online place in the hearts of millions

NOTE TO READERS: Steve Taylor was always looking for the next killer tweak of the early WWW which had only been invented two years earlier with the first graphical browser, Mosaic. He was tireless in his pursuit of gadgetry, bandwidth maximization, and the possibilities of the fledgling technology. To my own credit, I was doing a similar thing, but was not interested in what others were doing. Instead I was ecstatic that I finally had a platform upon which to create, and was taking each step to push my own possibilities. Steve's noetic opinion that I was one of the very earliest designers who was continuously pushing the envelope for animated GIFs and image maps in both functionality and aesthetics was perhaps not as appreciated by me, as it should have been. Those early months of the WWW negotiating HTML tricks, bandwidth limits and competing screen resolutions were indeed heady days. I was always looking for a partner, not flattery. I still think the sabotaged partnership a great shot for both of us, but I am thankful that Stephen Edward Taylor was there to offer his running critiques.

***

Ugh. What a 70s flashblack mess that site has turned out to be today with a hack or two of rogue code. Okay, I liked the "Dig Your Own Hole. Click here!" animated GIF, but the rest of that gizmodo is too much. I've never been to Las Vegas, and don't really want to if I had to ante up my own dime. Maybe with an expense account like Hunter S.... Of course there is some decent style here and there on the Sonicnet, but I really am annoyed by the flashing goo goo...reminds me of this 1970s-1950s retro burger drive-in in the south, cheesy and greasy, NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. But this topless bar peep show motif is just nasty, creepy design...

Don't know if you checked out the Bookskellar. I had a couple of errors in EVERY page that took me two swipes of file repair and FTP to alleviate, but it looks good now, except when testing just now I couldn't get a connection to AMAZON DOT COM, so I've still not seen complete and replicable success!

Originally published March 19, 1997. Text in italics contributed by Stephen Taylor

What the webmaster jobs are requesting is tantamount to a DTP job asking for a wordprocessing specialist who also knew PageMaker, Illustrator, and Photoshop, could output to a Linotronic after running it through Scitex Full Auto Frame, then create plates from the film, set up the four color press, run the entire job, then bind it and take care of circulation. Sure, there are probably a few people out there who could do all those things, but could they do all of them well? You'd probably end up with a typo-ridden, poorly designed, out-of-register, smeared, lopsidedly-bound publication with missing pages. Ah well, it will take a while for the management to catch up with the technology.

I gave it up, and unsubscribed. Don't really need that kind of cutting edge fizzle... Yep, the proliferation of job skills these ad writers include when soliciting a webmaster has wilted my spirits. You know me. No matter how much I know, I figger somebody else out there knows more and therefore deserves the job, so why don't I just cut out the aggravation when I'm rejected by keeping to my course of unemployment. Of course right now, thanks to my special dispensation thru Sue, I now have quite enough work on my plate to tide me through another month or so before I will feel the need to try to increase my daily worth by drooling over the classifieds.

I've felt the same aggravation in reading these and, in fact, in talking with certain employment agencies, "Well, most of our web jobs request ..." I shudder to think of what the pages created by these CGI wonks will look like ... Then again, I have already seen it. And some of them aren't as bad as one might expectthere's plenty of code to steal out there. Perhaps Cascading Style Sheets will allow good designers to truly stand out on the web. Without them, the least common denominator for type evens out the field. Many designers (such as yourself, of course) have gotten around this by using images

Thanks for your comments. Did you finally read AmPsycho? I still think you fit the bill. And the neighborhood storekeep's name is Mister U. Spelled just that way. I have seen it on a liquor license application as an ANC Commissioner. Got my first AMAZON cheque for $13 and a few nickels two weeks ago, and have already sold five this quarter starting July 1. Yippee!

Don't ask me how but it should be fun devising some randomatic system to pick the winner. You were the first to fill out the form, but I've sold thirteen boooks, only 87 to go, although technically since you didn't buy a book, you don't really factor as a qualifier. Maybe by 1999, I'll have a fully functional, well-contented, brimming with smirking texts and bad-ass graphics site that may get more than the thirty or so visitors a month I am currently getting.

P.S. Another slosh of SET MAIL in my box I see. But will send this before I
read any, since I wrote it last night but got jumped off before sending it.
Still tidying up the New iMote site offline. Will upload all at once, and
transfer all the subterranean stuff over to you know where in the same
session. Maybe toss in a snapshot of early digital man.

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Quoth the Raven

"Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself from the order of fashion. Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very people who would take them most seriously."